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"The record goes back centuries, and in every case, the pattern is the same. As recently as 2010, Barack Obama was “unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage,” considering it a bridge too far. Only

"The record goes back centuries, and in every case, the pattern is the same. As recently as 2010, Barack Obama was “unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage,” considering it a bridge too far. Only when it became politically safe did he side with the LGBTQ activists who had been fighting for their rights all along. Before that, it was leftists who led the charge to end apartheid in South Africa through a boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, similar to the one they propose against Israel today, while everyone from Ronald Reagan to the editors of the National Review opposed them and defended the apartheid. Likewise, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was considered far too radical by the American mainstream, with 61 percent of Gallup poll respondents saying they disapproved of the Freedom Riders. Today, despite Republican attempts to rewrite history, we know the protesters were in the right. So were the supporters of women’s suffrage, who were condemned for breaking windows and chaining themselves to things using language strikingly similar to what’s currently used to condemn Black Lives Matter or Palestine Action.

It’s the same with the protests against invading Vietnam: condemned at the time, now valorized in hindsight. Even earlier, the abolition of slavery was the territory of wild-eyed radicals like John Brown, who warned America that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood”—and of Karl Marx, who wrote that “Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.” The Civil War that followed bore that prophecy out. Even the most obvious propositions in the world, like ending child labor in factories, had to be dragged into the mainstream by socialists and trade unionists."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-left-is-always-right-too-early

#Left #Socialism #Progressivism #Liberalism #History

3 comments
  • IDEOLOGY = BULLSHIT:

    "Leftists don’t believe in “personal responsibility” for society-wide problems like homelessness. We do not believe that “job creators” bring “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” to the “free market,” and thus ought to have billions while everyone else has pennies. We do not believe, as Joe Biden did, in some nebulous and ineffable thing called the “soul of the nation” which can be redeemed through “decency.” Instead, leftists understand that politics is primarily a struggle for control over wealth and resources. It consists of labor, money, land, power, and violence, not abstract ideals, slogans, and mythologies. The technical term is historical materialism, but it really just means facing material reality without a lot of ideological junk in the way. And if you don’t have that, you wind up running down all kinds of blind alleys."

  • "At this point, a conservative reader might say: aha, but what about the cases where conservatives have been right, like when they said the Soviet Union was full of horrible gulags? Weren’t leftists reluctant to admit the truth then? Well, not exactly. Some of the more hardcore Marxist-Leninists stuck by Stalin long after it was sensible to do so, it’s true. But in this case it’s the anarchist left that was incredibly prescient. All the way back in the 1870s, Bakunin was writing that a revolutionary government ran the risk of becoming oppressive, as “the so-called people’s state will be nothing else than the very despotic guidance of the mass of the people by a new and numerically very small aristocracy of the genuine or supposedly educated… a fine liberation!” Chomsky calls it “one of the few predictions in the social sciences that actually came true.” Later, it would be Trotskyists like Victor Serge who wrote the most incisive critiques of Stalin and Stalinism. Meanwhile, conservatives have never had any trouble supporting dictatorships of their own (Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah in Iran, et cetera ad infinitum), so long as they were anti-communist."

  • Amazes me you're so short sighted.

    Why is the government even involved in marriage in the first place, except local legal structures from a contractual perspective.